Wax and other forms of sculpture
by rhoddlet
Summary: Dogs, wolves, Snape. Snape/Lupin.


Thanks go to everybody who made me a happy girl on LJ with the religion discussion and to everybody who commented on it. Also thanks to PZ who inspired the whole Remus obsession in the first place.  
  
SLASH AHEAD.  
  
*  
  
Lupin likes Snape exactly because Snape doesn't look real.  
  
Life isn't exactly real to begin with when you're a werewolf. For part of your life, you're stumbling through a dream where everything is covered in grey cloth, and you have wax stuffed in your ears and mouth and spread on your tongue; your fingers are oddly spidery, and you can't rid yourself of the feeling that things are crawling on you. The other part, you're ghosting through landscapes and time in a world where colors are nothing and the world is full of smells like emotions.  
  
It's a funny existence, one where you feel like you don't inhabit your own skin, and sixteen year old boys are uncomfortable enough in them to begin with.  
  
But Lupin appreciates the fact that Snape has an old fashioned face. A face and hands like that, and you'll never reconcile yourself to the world. Those long cheeks, that high forehead, those thin lips that flush impossibly red after he gives a blowjob, the bright spots of color on his cheeks when he gets one. Red, black, and the strange way his forehead folds over when he frowns. Remus likes running his fingers across the frown and feeling the crisp edges on Snape's skin, then kissing them away.  
  
The whole thing makes Potter brood and makes Sirius growly, and the day after Sirius came back and found them talking in the hallway in front of the Fat Lady, Sirius kicked Severus in the kidneys while they were switching classes, then punched him in the face. Remus was angry enough to go up to Sirius and tell him to let Severus alone or the next time that he didn't let Severus alone, the next time that they were in the Shack together, he was going to show Sirius why dogs don't run with wolves.  
  
Sirius had been a little startled, and Remus remembers smiling in triumph afterwards, this strange, intoxicating feeling behind his eyes. Potter had spoken up after Black leff the room, and he'd said, "You see that he's poisoning you, don't you?"  
  
"And Lily's not tying you to her with ladylove vines?"  
  
The funny thing about James is that you can see emotions move on his face. There's a whole weather system bound up into those small, finely made features, complete with clouds, sunny days and the occasional tropical hurricane. Hurricanes are always female, and lately, they only have one name. "That's different," James says.  
  
It is a commonly held fallacy that werewolves mate for life. Wolves might, but werewolves are a completely different species. If a pack of wolves comes upon a newly turned werewolf who hasn't made his first kill and thus, hasn't acquired his power over all things of the forest, they will tear him apart more viciously than they will a man.  
  
But Remus thinks that if he ever does settle down with someone, if there ever is somebody who will have him for always, it'll have to be somebody like Severus, who isn't of this time or this place. Last summer, Remus went to visit Snape at his house. Not during one of those weeks, of course, and Remus had never had so much fun as in that rambling old Scottish fortress- castle with floor stones the side of a small child and twenty foot thick walls. Snape lived in one wing of the house; his parents in the other, and the only time he ever saw them was if they happened to be walking out the front door at the same time. Snape even had a house elf who did the cooking and cleaning.  
  
And it's strange, Lupin thinks. That's the only place he's ever felt -- well, not at home, because he loves Hogwarts, but as if he were unremarkable. It's not the first place where other people thought he was unremarkable, which happens a great deal, but it's the first place where he felt as if he were about to fade away himself amidst those arrow-slit windows and the portraits of past Snapes in their black Calvinist suits and high collars. He sees the echoes of that in Snape's face, in his hands, in his rich tones and even in the strange, desperate way Snape kisses him.  
  
He's fading away, and he loves Snape for it. 


End file.
